Witness: Meteor explosion 'terrifying'

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Meteor explodes over Russia – A large chunk of a meteor that exploded over Russia is found in a lake on Friday, February 15.

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Meteor explodes over Russia – A meteor streaks through the sky before exploding with a flash and boom that shattered glass in buildings and left hundreds of people hurt.

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Meteor explodes over Russia – Workers repair a damaged power line near the wall of a local zinc plant. About 270 buildings were damaged -- mostly broken glass -- by shock waves caused by the blast, said Vladimir Stepanov of the National Center for Emergency Situations at the Russian Interior Ministry.

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Meteor explodes over Russia – The meteor leaves a white streak through the sky. The national space agency, Roscosmos, said scientists believed one meteoroid had entered the atmosphere, where it burned and disintegrated into fragments, according to RIA Novosti.

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Meteor explodes over Russia – The meteor's vapor trail passes over the city.

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Meteor explodes over Russia – A man removes shards of glass from the frame of a broken window.

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Meteor explodes over Russia – The meteor damaged windows at a sports hall.

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Meteor explodes over Russia – By noon Russia time more than 725 people had sought medical help.

Local officials have estimated the damage at more than 1 billion rubles (more than $33 million), RIA Novosti said. Chelyabinsk Gov. Mikhail Yurevich promised compensation to all those affected, the official Itar-Tass news agency said.

With temperatures dipping well below freezing at night, the need to fix windows left gaping by the blast is urgent.

The city of Chelyabinsk was functioning normally Saturday as the repair work began.

Workers swept up broken glass, boarded up holes and began fitting new panes of glass in some buildings.

"This is no exaggeration"

Residents told CNN of their shock as they saw, heard and felt the awesome blast, and the chaos and confusion they witnessed in the moments afterward, when no one knew what had happened.

Many were relieved nothing worse came to pass and believe the city had a lucky escape as fragments of the meteor came raining down.

Denis Kuznetsov, a 23-year-old historian from Chelyabinsk, told CNN via e-mail that he had heard and felt the shock wave despite being far from the center of the city.

At first there was a blinding flash lasting several seconds, which made him want to shut his eyes. The light shone "like 10 suns," he said. "This is no exaggeration."

Kuznetsov said he experienced what felt like "a push," as a sound wave passed through his body. "For some seconds I simply stood," amid the sound of breaking glass, he said.

After calming his parents, Kuznetsov tried to call friends, but all cellphone coverage was down. The Internet still worked, however, and he managed to reach a friend in the city center who told of emergency responders heading into the streets.

At first, confusion was widespread, he said, with many people believing the boom had to do with a satellite or plane. But within an hour or so, news broadcasts declared it was a meteorite.

"There was no panic. All behaved quietly," he said.

Schools and many offices closed. Kuznetsov monitored the news, as the reported number of victims "grew hour by hour," he said. "Thank God no one died."

The meteor was a once-in-a-century event, NASA officials said, describing it as a "tiny asteroid."

The space agency revised its estimate of the meteor's size upward late Friday from 49 feet (15 meters) to 55 feet (17 meters), and its estimated mass from 7,000 tons to 10,000 tons.

The space agency also increased the estimated amount of energy released in the meteor's explosion from about 300 to nearly 500 kilotons. By comparison, the nuclear bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 released an estimated 15 kilotons of energy.

The whole event, from the meteor's atmospheric entry to its disintegration in the air above central Russia, took 32.5 seconds, NASA said.

Dash cameras are popular in Russia for several reasons, including possible disputes over traffic accidents and the corrupt reputations of police in many areas. Drivers install the cameras for their own protection and to document incidents they could be caught in.

Five regions of Russia, one of them Chelyabinsk, are thought to have been affected, Itar-Tass said. RIA Novosti cited emergencies ministry officials as saying three regions and Kazakhstan were involved.

NASA said on its website that the meteor was the largest reported since 1908, when the famous Tunguska event took place in remote Siberia.

In that incident, an asteroid entered the atmosphere and exploded, leveling about 80 million trees over an area of 820 square miles -- about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island -- but leaving no crater.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

"When you have a fireball of this size, we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface, and in this case there were probably some large ones."